


stained with light

by fractiouscow



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Quasi-scientific shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-19 12:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9439562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fractiouscow/pseuds/fractiouscow
Summary: A dark night at the L-Corp lab turns bright because Kara is clean energy personified, and also has a superb sense of smell.





	

 

 

Lena Luthor knows that scientific experimentation necessarily yields a quantity of failure. She knows it for a fact, yet she feels dispirited and cross each time one of the rigid gel cubes she's handling loses cohesion and flops like a frightened souffle.

 

“Why can't you just set up properly? For once? Please? Shit.”

 

Alone in L-Corp's penthouse R&D lab past midnight, punchy and sober, Lena sometimes talks to herself. Or, like tonight, she talks to a table of experimental battery prototypes that don't pass muster.

 

She's trying to stabilize a cultured gel and coax it to crystallize at a 10 on the Mohs hardness scale. Once this hurdle is cleared, the gel will make a perfect carapace for a uranium waste-fueled battery that could provide energy for thousands of years.

 

This battery could change the world. It could deliver power to the powerless, heat and cool homes, cook food, pump water, light classrooms, run electric vehicles – cleanly and safely – for very little money.

 

Such an innovation might even rehabilitate the Luthor name, to some extent. Lena wants this very badly, and she's frustrated because she can feel _the breakthrough_ is within reach, yet it continues to elude her grasp.

 

When her disappointment reaches a certain level, she is prone to incautious movement, and as she smacks her precision screwdriver onto the table, the titanium T9 star bit ejects from the casing and clatters away as if fleeing a disaster.

 

Great. Now her tools are going AWOL.

 

“Coward,” Lena mutters. “Deserter.”

 

At low moments, when her attitude sinks and she starts searching her lab coat pockets for a white flag, Lena is sometimes swamped by nostalgia for her brother, before, when he was good to her. When he was good. The indefatigable Lex whose confidence and buoyancy were contagious.

 

“ _Buck up, buttercup. Failure is baked into the pie_ _, but that's no reason to deprive oneself of pie,”_ Lex once told her during a lifeline phone call, wherein college freshman Lena detailed a disastrous night spent prepping for a chemical kinetics final.

 

“ _The trick here, I think, is to fail higher, fuck upwards,”_ Lex went on. _“Take all your garbage work from today and pile it tall as a mountain. Climb up and dive off, like the raptor you are, and look for new attack vectors. A solution will raise its head from the grass and you'll go in for the kill. Just don't give up the hunt or I'll never speak to you again.”_

 

“ _Promise?” she'd replied, while wiping tears on her sleeve._

 

“ _It's no sacrifice. Now get back to work, dummy. You gotta ace your exams; it's too much pressure on me to be the hot Luthor_ _ **and**_ _the smart Luthor.”_

 

She'd laughed. She'd stopped feeling sorry for herself and gone back to work. She'd aced her exams. Barely two hours after her grades were posted, Lex had a chocolate pecan pie delivered to Lena's dorm with a note that read:

 

_Pie is for closers. Enjoy. - XO – Your brother, The Hot Luthor_

 

She misses that Lex, the gracious and sometimes silly boy who deliberately chose to behave like a sibling, the brilliant scion who made her so proud of their shared surname.

 

Sometimes Lena wonders if her memories are the only bright and sweet thoughts about him in the whole world, a stubborn candle laboring in Lex's long, black shadow. It's exhausting, and not a little shameful, being the keeper of this secret flame. She feels both foolish and resigned, helpless against the fact of her love for him.

 

Her eyelids flutter and close. She removes her safety glasses and rubs hard at the bridge of her nose and between her eyebrows, warding off a headache, or tears, or both. Lena won't cry at work. But some nights, weary and stumbling under the weight of legacy, it's a near thing.

 

Beyond the lab entrance, in the hallway, the reinforced stairwell door creaks open and clangs shut. Soft beeps sound as someone enters a twelve digit code at the access pad. The lab's hydraulic double doors whoosh open.

 

Lena checks her watch, which reads 1:53 a.m., but she doesn't spare a glance toward her visitor. Only two people can access this lab: one is Lena herself...

 

Two of the strongest arms in the world encircle her waist and lure her backward into a gentle embrace. Kara noses in behind her ear, whispers a hello, kisses her shoulder.

 

...and the other is Supergirl. She's wearing the blue and red suit and smells of woodsmoke, so Lena infers she isn't alone in her late evening toil.

 

“You work too much,” Kara says. “Your boss is a tyrant.”

 

“I cannot disagree. Tonight, I'd rather be fighting forest fires,” Lena replies, stroking her fingers along Kara's forearms. “How fares the chaparral?”

 

Kara hums at the light, scratching caress and moulds herself tighter against Lena's back. Lena swears the woman feels a few degrees warmer than usual, and she wonders how close Kara got to the wildfire, if she marched into the flames before extinguishing them with a cloud of frost. That always makes for great TV news footage in which Supergirl looks insanely sexy, haloed in fire and steam.

 

“Pretty good,” Kara answers. “We got all the residents out safe and contained the worst part of the fire. The forestry service lady – who looked kind of like Jessica Chastain? I don't know, whatever – she said it's now in a controlled surface burn pattern. It's a natural cycle where fire helps keep the forest healthy. You know, some of the plants don't reproduce unless they're literally on fire? How bonkers is that?”

 

This 'forestry service lady' was apparently a font of information, because Kara goes on and on about _fire followers_ and _facultative seeders_ , plants that burst free of restraining seed pods and germinate only after exposure to extreme heat.

 

Lena smiles at the enthusiasm in her voice, smiles because she loves how much Kara enjoys learning, because Kara's curiosity about this world and its people remains boundless. People humor her questions because people love to be heard, and Kara Zor-El, bless her infinite heart, will listen.

 

But once she starts listening, it's hard to break away and end a conversation cleanly. For the uninitiated, Kara's sincere focus can be inebriating. Lena remembers those first interactions, where she could scarcely control her own body language, with all the nervous flexing of fingers and lip biting and staring at Kara's mouth.

 

“A forestry service _lady_ , huh?” Lena asks, smirking.

 

“Yuh. Dr. Mizelle. She was really smart and really nice to me. Didn't seem annoyed by me asking a million questions or anything.”

 

“She wasn't annoyed by the attentions of a comely, intelligent superhero. Imagine that.”

 

“Stop!” Kara snickers and tickles her thumbs along Lena's sides. “Comely? Who says that? You're so weird. And it wasn't like that. She wasn't, like, _flirting_ or anything.”

 

Lena squirms and turns in her arms. “Bet she was,” she asserts, grinning and arching her brows. “Fifty bucks says Dr. Zero Dark Thirty gave you her card, wrote her cell number on the back, and took a selfie with your arm around her.”

 

Kara's mouth drops open. “Umm...”

 

“Right. Double or nothing: did she, at any point, brush a hand against your waist, or grip your biceps for longer than a three count?”

 

The penny drops and Kara's eyes go wide. “Oh.”

 

“Yes, my darling,” Lena says, patting Kara's broad shoulders and straightening her cape. “You've accidentally ruined another woman for all other women.”

 

Kara musters a fake frown. “Are you making fun of me? You know I can't tell sometimes.”

 

“I'm making fun of myself,” Lena clarifies. “I can empathize with Dr. Mizelle because I remember the effect you had on me. I spent the first several months of our friendship itching to put my hands on you, scheming ways to get your arms around me.”

 

“Gosh, you could've just asked,” Kara says, with a blush and a toothy smile. “I can guarantee I would've said yes.”

 

“Now she tells me.” Lena raises up on her toes and kisses Kara's mouth for a while.

 

Kara's lips taste of smoke, but her tongue is cool from using frost breath for hours. It's strangely delightful, and Lena strokes it with her own tongue, sucks on it, warms it with friction until they sigh and calm and settle into a loose hug.

 

“ _Rao_ ,” Kara whispers, reverently, with her eyes closed.

 

“ _Jesus_ ,” Lena agrees, because kisses that leaven your soul must surely be holy. She tucks her face against Kara's throat, feels the soft rumble of her voice.

 

“Long day with the battery project?” Kara asks.

 

“Too long,” she admits. “I can't seem to crack the problem, but I hate walking away from an unsolved issue.”

 

Kara pauses and Lena can practically feel her scanning the table, evaluating components, formulating her next question. She may or may not be using X-Ray vision; that particular power doesn't carry any major physical tells other than squinting, and Kara squints all the damn time. The girl squints when debating the merits of Thai takeout versus pizza, as if the fate of the world hinges on whether moo tod is more delicious than pepperoni and mushroom. Lena watches her, affectionately, and waits.

 

“Are the containment shells supposed to smell like that?” Kara finally asks.

 

Lena pulls back, perplexed and curious. “Smell like what, exactly?”

 

“I dunno.” Kara lifts one half-crystallized gel carapace to her nose and inhales deeply with her mouth open. “It's like gasoline, but kind of sweet.”

 

The answer, potentially the culprit behind the crystallization problem, hits Lena like a ton of bricks. “Benzene! It's benzene. It must be. We clean the gel mixers, casters, the CNC, all of it, with benzene.”

 

“So...what do you use to clean off the benzene?” Kara wrinkles her nose. “Because it is totally not working.”

 

“A salient observation,” Lena says. She shakes her head, disbelief and elation warring in her eyes. “Which I will explore. Tomorrow.”

 

“Cool.” Kara tosses the gel cube into the discard pile and pulls Lena against her chest. “Want me to fly us home?”

 

Lena just gapes. She can't even begin to process all the potential ramifications of this simple discovery. The world may shift on its axis because of her alien girlfriend's olfactory prowess. They should celebrate, treat themselves somehow. And, as her brother once rightly noted, pie is for closers.

 

“Do you know of a bakery or restaurant open this late?” Lena asks. “I have a craving for chocolate pecan pie.”

 

Kara's eyes glitter with joy. “Have you met me? _Of course_ I know where to get chocolate pecan pie at two in the morning.”

 

Lena almost giggles at Kara's preposterous happiness. Or is it her own preposterous happiness? At this point they're too intertwined to discern a difference.

 

“I adore you,” Lena says. “And we're going to save the world together.”

 

Supergirl's responding smile could power a spoiled First World city through a heatwave. Lena feels that luminous energy fill the crystal carapace inside her chest with a perpetual radiance that casts no shadows. Her heart is stained with light.

 

“Yeah,” Kara says, dauntless and beaming. “Isn't it the best?”

 

 

 


End file.
